23 December 2018 12:02 AM

One of the things I most enjoyed about living in Russia was the absence of prissy health and safety. The doors on the Moscow metro slammed shut with a vicious crash, after a single warning, and if you were caught in them, too bad. No pathetic reopening of the doors. So nobody ever was caught in them, and trains ran fast and frequently.

On ferociously freezing days when any Western airline would have given up, Russian internal flights took off without hesitation, and arrived on time.

This is nothing to do with communism or tyranny. Israel is much the same. Russia (how can I put this?) is still a rather masculine society, in which the influence of lawyers and social workers is minimal. And I rather think that if anyone was fool enough to fly a drone over one of Moscow’s major airports today, two things would happen within about half an hour. The drone would be shot out of the sky, and the person involved would be in the slammer, contemplating a lengthy spell in Siberia. If the airport ever had closed (which I doubt), it would soon be opened again.

When I lived there, in the 1990s, this aspect of it reminded me of the equally masculine post-war society in which I grew up.

‘Just get on with it,’ was a good rule, in my view, and it served us so much better than our current attitude. No doubt, the health and safety frenzy created by Margaret Thatcher and John Major (who licensed ambulance chasers here) saves some lives. But it also makes us so gutless that our very survival as a country is in question.

There’s another worrying thing about the wet response to the Gatwick drone. Here we are, with our own burgeoning KGB-type organisations. There’s the ludicrous MI5, lavished with public money and constantly claiming to be saving us from the supposed menace of terror.

Then there’s the so-called ‘British FBI’, the National Crime Agency. And MI6, which also claims to know everything. We also have the gigantic secret doughnut of GCHQ, supposedly plucking the plots of the wicked from the airwaves with fantastically sophisticated devices. Not to mention the police who, having forgotten how to walk, maintain their own air force instead.

And then there is the huge industry of ‘airport security’, which forces innocent people to shuffle through humiliating searches, in which they must remove their clothes and have their private parts photographed by scanners, before they can get near a plane.

But all these organisations and ‘security’ personnel can’t find a way to deal with what is, in effect, a large remote-controlled toy helicopter buzzing about near the runway. It is nothing to do with the resources available to them. It is just that they have all gone soft, like supermarket apples.

It is rather lucky that we don’t actually have any serious enemies at the moment, isn’t it?

***

Bloated unis are a lesson in stupidity

It is now almost 30 years since this country made one of its gravest mistakes – the expansion of universities.

The vast cost of this folly has now found its way on to the Government books, after long years when the Treasury tried to pretend that student debt – much of which will never be paid off – wasn’t a national liability.

And within days of this outbreak of truth, unchallengeable research confirmed what every properly educated person has known for many years, that the ‘degrees’ awarded by the new expanded universities are inflated paper. Even deluded foreign admirers of Britain will have spotted this.

What the Major and Blair governments did when they expanded universities was to raise the school leaving age to 22, so hiding much of the terrible youth unemployment in this country. And then they compelled the young victims of this fraud to take out huge debts to pay for their often-wasted years at often-miserable colleges.

Who will have the courage to admit that this was a terrible mistake, and close it down? How many more poor school-leavers will end their college years clutching certificates they can barely read, qualified only for flipping burgers, while the foolish comprehensive schools, which failed to teach them what they really need to know, continue to decay and decline?

***

A sinister choice for our festive favourite

How strange that It’s A Wonderful Life, a very American story, has become Britain’s favourite Christmas film. Actually, the nightmare scene during which George Bailey learns what the world would have been like had he never been born, is some of the most sinister and disturbing footage ever shot. And you might be interested to note that the apparently mild-mannered Cabinet Minister Michael Gove says he prefers the rackety, amoral Pottersville of the nightmare to sweet, benevolent Bedford Falls.

***

I have made many enemies by refusing to join in the anti-Russian frenzy. I was particularly scorned for pointing out that Britain’s pious attacks on the Russian bombing of Aleppo were ridiculous, given what Western forces were doing in cities ruled by Islamic State.

Now Anthony Loyd of The Times has visited Raqqa which, like Mosul, was shelled and bombed heavily by US and British forces, though the British Government has absurdly denied causing any civilian casualties there. And he has found that Syrian workers recovering the dead say the vast majority of the remains being dug from the ruins are ‘those of civilians killed by coalition air strikes and artillery fire’.

Let’s hope that these facts will end the ridiculous moral posturing of the Western countries about Russia’s role in the Syrian war. The real blame for all this misery lies in those Western countries.

By intervening first in Iraq and then in Libya and Syria, they transformed this whole region into a cauldron of war.

And they turned hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians into corpses, and millions into refugees and economic migrants.

***

This Christmas Eve it is 50 years since the Apollo 8 Moon Mission, which transformed our view of our planet by providing the two most astonishing photos of our home: one of the whole planet, the only tiny trace of warmth and colour in a frozen, monochrome universe; the other of Earth rising over the surface of the Moon. The astronauts – practical, military men versed in science, maths and engineering but overcome by the mysterious glory of the universe seen from space – took it in turns to read the soaring poetry of the opening words of the King James Bible. How the atheists fumed. Let them. They can never defeat Christmas.

***

I recently had to beat off attacks from the feminist sisterhood after using the adjective ‘squawking’. They ruled that it could only apply to women (it doesn’t) and was therefore automatically an expression of anti-woman feeling (it wasn’t).

So I am puzzled by the strange Tory rage about Jeremy Corbyn allegedly muttering ‘stupid woman’ under his breath (something Lord Hague was also once accused of doing).

Why exactly would a Tory think this rather mild expression was such a frightful thing to say? Politically correct people can, and do, classify everything and anything as misogyny. But do Tories do this? It seems so. Was this the moment the Tory Party became officially PC?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

25 November 2018 12:36 AM

The astonishing case of Professor Alice Roberts, and her public war with her mother about God and schools, would have gained far more attention than it has, if it were not for the way that the EU row has sucked the breath out of every aspect of life – and please, please, can this soon be over?

Professor Roberts, who is on TV a lot, has just become the new face of Humanists UK, a movement dedicated, as far as I can make out, to spreading the belief that there is no God.

Note that the Professor’s increasingly public commitment to being anti-religious has not prevented her from presenting several prominent programmes on the supposedly impartial BBC. These days it hardly seems worth even questioning that.

But in her first and very successful bid for Humanist publicity, she made a grave mistake. She got the publicity. But it wasn’t good publicity. As anti-religious people so often do, she attacked the fact that large numbers of English state schools have a Christian character. She wanted the state to stop funding Church schools. She accused them of indoctrination. But, funnily enough, it turned out that her own children attended such a Church school.

You’d think, from the way she went on, that her offspring faced being compulsorily harangued about hellfire all day.But then, Splat! The Professor’s mother, Wendy, herself a teacher, stepped in. She made the very good point that her daughter’s celebrity, granted to her by the almighty BBC, would swing a lot of opinion (as it does), for no other reason than that she is well-known.

Wendy Roberts gently pointed out that her daughter’s complaints were overdone, as most Church schools promote a general Christian atmosphere, rather than drilling doctrine into their pupils.

These schools survive for a simple reason, which it is hard to argue against. The Churches in England pioneered education for the children of the poor. They raised the money, trained the teachers, bought the land and paid for the buildings, decades before the Government ever got involved. Eventually, they handed over their schools to the State, in the 1940s, on condition that they kept their Christian nature.

Who does this harm? Nobody. For reasons we’re not sure of, Church primaries are often the best schools in their neighbourhoods. Many parents pretend to live where they don’t, or pretend to be religious, to get what Professor Alice Roberts has been given without any such fuss. If she really doesn’t like the prayers and the Christian teaching, she can withdraw her children from them. But she doesn’t. I suspect that she is also quite able to pay school fees, if she chooses, and so escape the whole business.

So why is she making a public martyr of herself? Could it be that she is just an annoying zealot?

If so, it is not the fault of her education or her Christian parents. Alice Roberts herself went to a Church of England primary school and was brought up in a Christian home. Her father, an aeronautical engineer, was even a church warden. If children are in such danger of being brainwashed into religious belief, how has Alice Roberts now ended up as the shiny figurehead of an anti-Christian outfit?

The answer is quite simple. We may learn, at home or in school, a little about the selfless faith of love and trust which has sustained and shaped our civilisation and helped to make us free. But as soon as we turn on the TV or the radio, especially the BBC, or go to university, and in many, many state schools as well, we are in the hands of people like Alice Roberts, who think it clever and advanced to belittle the Christian religion, and drive it out of the society it created.

Their indoctrination is ceaseless, relentless and filled with scorn. It is almost impossible to escape. And it is working. I wonder, does Alice Roberts think that the triumph of ‘Humanism’, and the expulsion of Christianity from the schools, will lead to some sort of secular paradise? She is in for a shock. Religion in this country is due for a revival, as material wealth fails. But who will benefit?

The force that is most likely to fill the gap left when the Church dies is Islam – strong, increasingly powerful and present in our midst, confident, quite unafraid of people like her.

If she gets her way, she may live to see her granddaughters attending schools where they have to wear hijabs and chant the Koran. Then, rather too late, she might begin to see the virtues of the Church of England.

***

A squalid twist in UKIP's tale

In spite of much badgering from its members, I was never really tempted to join UKIP, which in gentler days I used to view as a Dad’s Army party of lost Thatcherites, led by a man, Nigel Farage, who had come close to calling for the decriminalisation of marijuana.

Well, wasn’t I wise to steer clear? Its current leader, Gerard Batten, is even less attractive than Mr Farage. He already had a certain something about him, but his decision to appoint the dangerous and frightening ‘Tommy Robinson’ as an adviser means that he is deliberately leading UKIP into the squalid badlands of rabble politics.

Mr ‘Robinson’ (the alias is said to be the name of a once-famous Luton football hooligan) is really Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, an unlovable and mysterious figure with an unpleasant record, some of it criminal, and some very unattractive supporters. I have for some time feared that Yaxley-Lennon might be a British Trump, if such a thing could exist, and UKIP seems to be trying to usher him into the fringes of proper politics.

It ought to work the other way. Associating with Yaxley-Lennon ought to mean the end of UKIP. But in our current fevered atmosphere, and with the ever-present danger of serious economic trouble, I am not so sure. Once again I recall warning the complacent Left in this country years ago that they really ought to listen to me, or they would certainly encounter something or somebody nothing like as nice as I am. Well, here it comes.

***

Now we have the Trump doctrine. If you’re rich enough, and buy enough of our planes, you can murder your own people to your heart’s content. The Oaf President has told the Saudis that their now undoubted assassination of Jamal Khashoggi does not matter. So there’s an end to all and every pious intervention in any foreign country, for ever more. If the Khashoggi murder, deliberate, state-sponsored, hugely grisly, approved at the highest level, is OK, then pretty much everything is OK. The grim truth is that, while nobody has ever been crude enough to say so out loud before, this is actually an honest statement of the real position of the US and UK governments. And so, they can never again whip up phoney, selective moral outrage to justify whatever war they wish to start. They’ll have to tell us the real reason instead.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

18 November 2018 1:25 AM

***NB: Comments on this article were earlier closed in error. They are now open.***

For far too long we in this country have thought we were richer, more powerful and, in general, better than we actually are. Now we find out the hard truth, exposed in all its gloomy detail by the EU talks. Will we learn the necessary lesson, or will we prefer our precious illusions?I can just remember in the mists of childhood memory the 1956 Suez crisis, the feeling of panic and humiliation in the air. In that year, too many of us continued to imagine we were more important than we were. The Americans wasted no time in letting us know that we no longer ruled the waves, harassing our ships at sea and threatening us with bankruptcy on the world markets.The sense of decline was especially strong in our house, since my father was a Naval officer, and the end of Britain as a world power also meant the rapid shrinking of the fleet and, as it happened, the end of his 30 years in Her Majesty’s service.Then came the Profumo affair. A once-respected governing class was caught with its trousers down and, while I had no idea what a call-girl was, or what the War Minister was supposed to have done, I sensed ever afterwards that authority had just gone soft and would give way when pushed.And so it proved. In the decades that followed, we abandoned all the things that had made us great. Thatcherism, much misunderstood and over-rated at the time, did little to reverse the underlying decline. Years later, when I finally went to live abroad, I learned how little other countries cared about us. The toughest lesson came in Washington DC, where I observed our powerlessness when Bill Clinton took the side of the Provisional IRA against Britain, his supposed closest democratic ally, and forced us to give in to terror.How I laugh now when they go on, in the USA, about how they will never give in to Al Qaeda or Islamic State, or whoever it is. Oh, really? Those who now moan over Northern Ireland having a special status in the EU deal have left it a bit late. Since Britain’s forced surrender to Sinn Fein in 1998, arranged to placate Irish votes and political donors in the USA, the province has only been a conditional part of the UK.A single referendum can (and will) hand it over forever to Dublin’s control at any time. We are a small, increasingly indebted and poorly defended country off the coast of North-West Europe, with an education system which is a global disgrace. We are not the great world power we would like to think we are. What sort of deal did you think such a nation could get from our giant German-dominated neighbour? Personally, I’d hoped to shake loose from the frightful European Arrest Warrant but nobody even seems to have asked for that, thanks to our weird obsession with trade over all else. Otherwise, this is what there is. Say what you like about Theresa May, and I have. But in this matter she has borne herself with dignity and integrity, a quiet, unshowy, resolute and very English sort of dogged courage of the kind I was brought up to admire. She has peered over the abyss and knows what is there. Nobody else would have done any better. Let us have it over and done with. The politicians may play their little games for a few days yet, making investments for their future careers. But this is what we can get and if we do not take it, then it will be Suez all over again – a few brief weeks of heady fantasy, and many long hard years paying the bill for our illusions.

Share this article:

03 November 2018 4:03 PM

Some readers asked for a complete transcript of a passage in my recent speech and discussion at Warwick, where I spoke about the disastrous effects of licensing open and public lying in marriage ceremonies, which is what the remarriage of divorced persons does. Some of the words are unclear or ambiguous in the actual recording. I have partly transcribed and partly cleaned up the passage (removing some repetitions and other stupidities) so that it is not verbatim, but it is a faithful full record of what I said and intended:

'Divorce is not permission to separate. If people really want to separate, they can separate. They don’t need to divorce to do that. Divorce is permission to remarry. I don’t know what your view is on oaths and promises, whether you think people should keep them or not. But if you give someone permission to remarry when their living spouse is still on this earth, then what you are saying is this: that though you have made a pledge to remain married for life to one person, you can abandon that pledge and make the same promise to somebody else, who knows you have lied to your previous spouse. Now it seems to me that certainly no church and no rational legal system can encourage people in promise-breaking on that level.

Or you could say, which is pretty much what our society has said, that in the modern world our promises are now worthless; that what we say, we don’t mean. We can't be relied upon to follow through what we promise. We are therefore a society which cannot actually rely on trust. That’s another route to take.

But of course if you examine this society, and any really civilized society, with any care then you will realise that it is upon trust that people will keep their words and keep their obligations.

We cannot conceivably enforce every single breach of promise with a legal action, with the police, with courts.

We have to rely on the fact that we trust people.

Therefore if we have at the heart of our Constitution of Private Life (which is what marriage is) a rejection of the idea that we actually mean what we say, then we put that also at the heart of everything else we do, and so we toss into the dustbin the whole idea of trust. And with trust gone you will find very rapidly that it's very difficult to run an advanced civilisation.

The Third World runs pretty much on mistrust, but really successful societies run on trust. If trust goes you will find in the strong state mistrust, a higher level of dishonesty, corruption and inefficiency with which you will have to live. It will be unpleasant.

I think you have to start as you mean to go on. If the most important promise you make in your life is one which is actually officially viewed as a promise which is not to be taken seriously then you are living in a society which is not be taken seriously'.

21 October 2018 12:00 AM

Negotiation is a test of strength. And Britain is far weaker than the giant German empire that is the EU.

Sooner or later, if we truly want to get out of that empire, we are going to have to grasp this. Poor, hopeless Theresa May hasn’t a chance, not least because she has never really wanted to leave. So she flounders between wild fake militancy, adopted to protect her right flank, and pathetic weakness – her actual position.

But I have even less time for the posturing braggarts, on all sides of the question, who now pretend that their positions are so pure and wonderful that they cannot give an inch. The Europhiles are ghastly, especially their dangerous call for a second referendum.

It was one of them, the disastrous David Cameron, who lumbered us with the first referendum. Now, like a man with a crushing hangover who reaches with trembling hands for the bottle that gave it to him, they whimper for another one.

But worst of all are those who demand a total, pure exit from the EU, even if it means a catastrophic walkout with nothing agreed.

As I sometimes point out, I don’t recall seeing most of these heroes around when I was one of the few voices calling for British independence in the long years before 2016.

Back then, most of these born-again, all-or-nothing fanatics, in politics and the media, were keen allies of Mr Cameron, perhaps the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.

Remember how he derided anyone who objected to the loss of national independence as silly old fools ‘banging on’, or as ‘fruitcakes’. Well, it seems, they are all fruitcakes now. Though their obsessions are strange.

I wanted to get out of the EU, and still do, because I believe continental law and forms of government will eventually destroy English law and our unique free Parliament.

I couldn’t give a farthing for the freedom to import chlorine-washed chicken from the USA, or fling our markets open wide to Asia. In fact, I rather fear it. I do not think that, by leaving the EU, we will suddenly export more. Why would that happen? Our goods are not especially cheap and we make little that the world actually wants. I think we will import more.

What I want to do is rip up our allegiance to the European Arrest Warrant, a grave breach of our ancient liberties which everyone seems to have completely forgotten about. I want to get rid of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, now our real Supreme Court. And I want to stop rubber-stamping European Commission directives and pretending they are our own laws. And I would also like to shake free of the crazy policy of pushing the EU eastwards into Ukraine and the Caucasus.

If Brussels and Washington really want a war with Russia, then let them have one. But Britain has no interest at all in reviving this grubby, aggressive conflict, which has already convulsed Europe twice in one century.

These aims can be achieved by doing what I have now been urging for months – the Norway Option. This needs no permission from Brussels. It formally takes us out of the EU, so fulfilling the referendum vote. It would make the Irish border as relaxed as the current frontier between Norway and Sweden, which is pretty relaxed. It frees us from three-quarters of EU interference in our laws and life.

It keeps us in the European Economic Area, so there is no risk to the economy. It frees us from the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy and from the daylight robbery of the Common Fisheries Policy. It hugely cuts our contributions to Brussels.

But, thanks to strident, inflexible groups of MPs whose main concern is their future careers, it has barely been considered.

I can’t stop them. But if they manage to lead us into chaos and an economic crash, then I shall at least try to make sure that their selfish folly is not forgotten.

****

A whiff of decay swirls around Britain

I have often predicted that we would soon be applying for full membership of the Third World. But I think we may actually have secretly joined it.

In the last week, my regular railway line, in the throes of a vastly expensive and interminable modernisation, grossly behind time and over budget, was shut down.

Why? Because a test train ran along it and managed to pull down 500 yards of newly installed electric cable. But this was just an inventive new sort of mess. Normally it closes, or slows down to the speeds of the 19th Century, every few days for a ‘signal failure’ or because the weather is too hot, too cold or too windy, or because of mysterious disappearances of train crew. Are they being abducted by aliens?

While I endure this, I am unceasingly hectored by automated announcements, the latest being a creepily friendly voice that urges me to hold the handrail as I go up the stairs on the station footbridge.

The fewer and later the trains, the more announcements there are. But when everything goes totally wrong, silence falls, staff disappear and electronic screens go blank.

On my way to the station, I have to pick my way past unending roadworks (I do not think the three-mile journey has been free of these for a single day in the past three years). Most of the time nothing at all is actually happening, and it would take a trained archaeologist to work out what has changed from one week’s end to the next.

At the luxurious cinema in a newly built shopping mall (which took longer to complete than the Pyramids), buckets recently appeared to catch leaks from the ceiling after some moderately heavy rain. Its air-conditioning was overpowered by the summer heatwave, which is surely what it was built to deal with.

And ever and again, as I walk or bicycle down the streets of modern British cities, which are flashy and modern on the surface, my nose picks up the ancient, unmistakable smell of malfunctioning drains, which you might expect to encounter in Baghdad, Cairo or Bombay, but is something new here.

And if it’s not that, it is the equally unwelcome aroma of marijuana, that is now legal here in all but name.

Signed copies of my new book 'The Phoney Victory' and of all my books can now be ordered through Blackwell's *Oxford* Bookshop Contact customers.ox@blackwell.co.uk or 01865 (+44 1865) 333623.For unsigned copies, please go here

I am rather ashamed now by how unmoved I was by the original Moon landings in 1969.

It was only after I saw, in a Moscow museum, the tiny fire-blackened capsule in which Yuri Gagarin returned to Earth that it came home to me just how much courage astronauts needed to go into space.

The powerful if rather gloomy film First Man, in which Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong, is a useful reminder of an astonishing episode which I lived through, but which is now as remote as the first flight of the Wright brothers was to me in my childhood.

It’s also amusing to be reminded that man went to the Moon in supposedly archaic miles, feet and inches, not modern metres.

****

Why do British police forces keep going on about ‘county lines’, a fancy name for drug dealers from big cities extending their operations to small towns?

We don’t have ‘county lines’ in Britain, we have county boundaries, so the American phrase has no meaning here.

In any case, can any police chief explain why they still more or less enforce the law against selling drugs, but not the law against buying them? The engine of the whole trade comes from the money handed over by buyers. So why are buyers left alone? It makes no sense. And it doesn’t work.

Since I published my collection of foreign reports, 'Short Breaks in Mordor' as a (very crude and basic) e-book some years ago, several readers have said how they wished it was available as a proper three-dimensional book. I have good news for them. Over the last few months, thanks to some much-valued help from a friend with a much better grasp of technology than I shall ever have, I have now published 'Short Breaks' as a print-on-demand paperback. It is available here: https://amzn.to/2R2LaYn

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

07 October 2018 2:44 PM

When will people grasp the difference between what the Tory party says it is, and what it actually is? It is not as if it tries hard to hide it. Here is a clue. It is not conservative at all.

It is a machine for obtaining power. It would cheerfully guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square, if it thought that by doing so it could keep or gain office. That is why it has spent the past 20 years becoming more Blairite than New Labour.

It helps to pay attention. Last week’s single most far-reaching act by the May government was to strike the final death-blow at the institution of marriage.

You would have thought a self-styled ‘Conservative’ party would like marriage. It is all about private life, the keeping of promises, and saving what we can of the Christian religion in a society which prefers to worship at shopping malls and football stadiums.

But Theresa May, who can seldom stop herself mentioning that she is a parson’s daughter, chose her party’s conference to declare that she now backs civil partnerships for heterosexuals. Unlike her grotesque attempts at dancing, this attracted little attention. That is a pity.

After a period of ‘consultation’ in which conservative voices will be sneeringly ignored, this change will happen. And Britain will have roughly the same attitude towards family life as the old Soviet Union did – a temporary contract in a world where everyone’s real parent is the almighty state.

Civil partnerships are state licenses for cohabitation. They are deliberately stripped of any remaining religious content. That is why radicals have been campaigning for them for so long. There is no room in them for the ‘sexist’ distinction between husband and wife. And they will be easier to get out of than a car-leasing agreement.

But they will give those who enter them the same legal rights, in terms of pensions, inheritance and next-of-kin privileges as those who make the much deeper commitment of lifelong marriage, still just about available at a church near you.

From now on, the only people who live together but will not be able to get these protections will be brothers and sisters, who continue to be driven from their former homes by inheritance tax, when one of them dies.

So why bother with the tougher option? Just as bad money drives out good, these feeble half-commitments will supplant marriage for most. The change, designed for the convenience of adults who don’t what to be too bound by deep pledge, will leave almost no barrier between children and the mighty forces of the government on one hand and greedy commerce on the other.

It is the fulfilment of a prophesy made by the contraceptive fanatic and ultra-liberal moral reformer Helen Brook who proclaimed in 1980 ‘From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions - objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.’

If the Tory Party believed in anything, it would never have accepted this revolutionary change, or many of the other ghastly, left-wing things it does to try to keep its ratings up. But it believes in nothing. And that is why it could so very easily lose the next election to a Labour Party which does believe in something.

*********

Sometimes I wonder just how many of the people who collect awards and honours really deserve them. I have seen a lot of people fail to get credit for hard work, courage and enterprise, while others carried off the gongs.

Well, the clever new film ‘The Wife’ examines this problem in a rather intelligent fashion, so that you will never view a Nobel Prize in the same way again. Glenn Close is superb, but perhaps the most amazing performance is by her daughter Annie Starke, playing the same character when young and reasonably innocent.

*********

How foolish can people be? Do they not understand the dangers they court? The Labour peer Andrew Adonis is stomping the country demanding a second referendum on the EU. He and his friends, who include the thuggish commissar and warmonger Alastair Campbell, call this scheme a ‘People’s Vote’, as if the first referendum somehow did not involve people.

I hate referendums anyway. They don’t fit in our carefully-balanced constitution, which gives the final decision on all matters to Parliament. But how can that be so, if there is a rival source of power which also comes from the voters? This is the cause of the mess we are now in, which is quite bad enough.

But surely votes of all kinds must be final? If we keep re-running them, then we undermine the whole principle of democracy, that a majority, however small, decides the question. And once that principle has gone, peace and order are in danger, as nobody ever again accepts an outcome he doesn’t like.

This is playing with fire and could end with political violence on the streets. A wise compromise between the two sides – I again urge the Norway option – is a far better way of resolving this foul-up.

********

Speaking as a Kremlin Stooge (this silly phrase is applied to everyone who doesn’t join in the current wild anti-Russian panic), can I make some points about the frenzy surrounding Russian agents caught in the act in The Hague?

No doubt Russian intelligence sometimes does wicked things, and also makes a fool of itself. But shouldn’t we be examining our own spy and security services before squeaking piously about others?

On Thursday, an astonishing letter written by the former premier David Cameron, was disclosed. It says ‘In the discharge of their function to protect national security, the security service (that’s MI5) has a long-standing policy for their agent handlers to agree to agents participating in crime, in circumstances where it is considered such involvement is necessary and proportionate in providing or maintaining access to intelligence that would allow the disruption of more serious crimes or threats to national security.’ In other words, they are licensed to commit very serious crime.

British undercover police officers have also fathered children with women they were spying on, and then vanished, which seems pretty cruel and ruthless to me.

And the free West in general has not always been wholly competent. The CIA’s absurd attempts to kill Fidel Castro, including exploding cigars, come to mind. So does the more tragic episode of the ‘Rainbow Warrior’, the Greenpeace ship blown up by French spooks, in which an innocent man died. Remember the ridiculous ‘fake rock’, which MI6 installed in Moscow, a high-tech dead-letter box designed to look like a lump of stone? Russian agents detected it and in 2006 released film of MI6 handlers passing secret messages through it, presumably intended for Russian spies in British pay.

Russian TV showed a British diplomat walking past the rock with his eyes shifting wildly as he was secretly filmed by FSB counter-intelligence. Another British diplomat was filmed kicking the malfunctioning rock, and then picking it up.

My advice in all such matters is ‘Calm down, dear’. Russia is in no position to attack us. Its economy is the size of Italy’s and failing badly. Meanwhile we pay no attention to the real threat from China, which has now extended its influence into South America, and into Eastern Europe, and which grows more powerful every day.

Share this article:

30 September 2018 12:50 PM

Signed copies of my new book 'The Phoney Victory' and of my reissued book 'The Abolition of Britain' can now be ordered through Blackwell's Oxford Bookshop (Oxford only). Contact customers.ox@blackwell.co.uk or 01865 (+44 1865) 333623.

Some readers seem to think that they will need to go to Oxford to collect them, incurring parking fines and other inconveniences. No, we have postal services in Oxford, despite strong resistance to such flashy innovations in the 19th century. It goes like this: